Well, not quite. But the number of users on Quisition, my flashcard site, just exceeded the number of users on Potter Predictions. I'm hoping for 1,000 by the end of the year.
by : Created on Sept. 23, 2007 : Last modified Sept. 23, 2007 : (permalink)
I've mentioned before that I have over five recordings of the Goldberg Variations in iTunes. I just increased that by one after purchasing Simone Dinnerstein's new recording on the strength of Tyler Cowen's comments.
It's definitely a lot more "modern" than Gould's interpretation but it is, quite simply, one of the most amazing recordings I've ever listened to. Definitely a candidate for a desert island album.
Of course, as a composer, the desert island candidacy is as much to do with the piece itself as the interpretation. The Goldberg Variations would have to rate as one of the greatest pieces of music ever written. There is pretty nice article on the piece on Wikipedia.
And for extra Goldberg Variation goodness, check out the video of Christopher Taylor playing parts of it on the only double-manual Steinway ever made.
by : Created on Sept. 22, 2007 : Last modified Sept. 22, 2007 : (permalink)
I've already mentioned habitualist without explanation of what it is.
The site now reveals a little more of the concept I'm working on. I should be starting a closed alpha soon.
by : Created on Sept. 19, 2007 : Last modified Sept. 19, 2007 : (permalink)
At the Workshop on Features at the LAGB 2007 conference in London earlier this month, I met Ron Kaplan in person and he told me about the startup Powerset that he's involved in. It was enough of a clash of worlds that I was talking entrepreneurship at an academic conference, but then this week they were announced as one of the TechCrunch40.
It's not that often that these two facets of my life intersect.
Congrats, Ron!
by : Created on Sept. 19, 2007 : Last modified Sept. 19, 2007 : (permalink)
One of the things that's been most frustrating developing websites like Quisition, habitualist and the new Cats or Dogs is the difference between Firefox and Safari (and I guess IE) in determining the width of a block.
Firefox only makes a div as wide as the content needs to be (plus any padding). Safari makes the div as wide as the parent div (minus the parent's padding and the div's own margins).
In different situations, both approaches are desirable.
Short of fixing the width (which does give the same behaviour on both Firefox and Safari) how does one (with CSS) make Firefox behave like Safari or Safari behave like Firefox?
UPDATE: Okay, debugging 101: find the smallest thing that reproduces the problem. It turns out to have to do with multiple embedded floats. The following behaves differently in Firefox and Safari:
<div style="float: left;"> <div style="float: left;"> <div style="width: 400px;">foo</div> <div style="background: #CCC;">bar</div> </div> </div>
In Firefox, bar's background is only as big as the text. In Safari it extends 400px.
UPDATE (2007-09-19): Courtesy of William Bardon, now see http://jtauber.com/2007/09/div_test.html
A screen shot of that, with the window narrow enough that the third test isn't on the same line as the second is at http://jtauber.com/2007/09/tauber_bardon_test_safari.png
The same thing in Firefox can be seen at http://jtauber.com/2007/09/tauber_bardon_test_firefox.png
by : Created on Sept. 16, 2007 : Last modified Sept. 16, 2007 : (permalink)
mValent recently moved from Burlington (the same town in which I live) to larger offices in Waltham. It's not far distance-wise, but anyone who's driven on that stretch of 128 knows it's a nightmare, more than a 5x increase in commute time for me, which is particularly painful given that I haven't had a commute over 5 minutes in eight years (unless you count the 34 hours it takes to get from Perth to Boston).
I may finally have the time to listen to podcasts which means, of course, I'll be relying on Scouta for recommendations.
by : Created on Sept. 15, 2007 : Last modified Sept. 15, 2007 : (permalink)
I just added the following to the django-atompub page on Google Code:
The approach is to start from the specific and only later make it more generic. In other words, I'm building a specific Atom store implementation with all sorts of simplifying assumptions, such as the fact that a collection's path is always /collection/{id}/. Over time, I will make this more generic and django-atompub will be a library rather than an implementation. I'll still keep the specific implementation going though, it will just be called "Demokritos" again and will not be hosted here. Demokritos will be an Atom store that happens to be written on top of Django. django-atompub will be a contributed library for people wanting to add Atom support to their Django sites.
by : Created on Sept. 15, 2007 : Last modified Sept. 15, 2007 : (permalink)
Today is a world-wide Django sprint. I was at work during the day so couldn't participate but now I'm home, I'm planning on spending the evening working exclusively on my open source django apps:
by : Created on Sept. 14, 2007 : Last modified Sept. 14, 2007 : (permalink)
IBM's Many Eyes is a wonderful site for creating and sharing visualizations of data. They recently added a "word tree" visualization which shows weighted suffix trees.
Given I've been working on the inference of inflectional morphology in New Testament Greek for my PhD, I thought I'd upload words with nominal inflection (nouns, pronouns, adjectives, participles) along with their morphosyntactic features (case, number, gender).
For example, to see how dative, plural, masculine nominals end, you just search for occurrences ending in "DPM"
See http://services.alphaworks.ibm.com/manyeyes/view/SgoRsIsOtha66N-wO-cwI2-
At some stage I'll probably do my own visualization that, while not as pretty, will be more customized to inflectional morphology.
by : Created on Sept. 11, 2007 : Last modified Sept. 11, 2007 : (permalink)
Yesterday, Steve Jobs announced a $200 drop in the price of the iPhone. Some people are claiming it's because it wasn't selling. Others are claiming it's unfair to the people that already bought one (although I'm still waiting for someone to claim the original price was "price gouging"!)
I'm with John Gruber:
Apple didn’t cut the price because demand is low — they set the debut price ridiculously high because demand was ridiculously high. I suspect that for the first few weeks, they were selling iPhones as fast as they could make them. Apple’s being aggressive, not defensive. (And for those of you who’ve already bought one and are pissed about the price cut, if you didn’t think the iPhone was worth $599, you shouldn’t have bought it. That’s how supply and demand works.)
Nicely put, John.
UPDATE: So, Steve Jobs has now said he'll refund $100 to existing iPhone owners. His open letter makes an excellent point, though:
There is always change and improvement, and there is always someone who bought a product before a particular cutoff date and misses the new price or the new operating system or the new whatever. This is life in the technology lane. If you always wait for the next price cut or to buy the new improved model, you'll never buy any technology product because there is always something better and less expensive on the horizon.
by : Created on Sept. 6, 2007 : Last modified Sept. 6, 2007 : (permalink)
